NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES
ISSUE 10.3 (WINTER 2014)
Mansfield Park and “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”:
Fanny’s Re-Enactment of the Gothic Anti-Heroine Lady Branxholm’s Gender Reversal
By Esra Melikoǧlu, Istanbul University
<1> Elizabeth Inchbald’s romantic comedy Lovers’ Vows (1798) is merely one among the many
intertexts to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).(1) The purpose of the present article is to
explore the relevance of another—much neglected—intertext to the carnivalesque confusion of
gender identities in Austen’s novel: Walter Scott’s metrical gothic romance “The Lay of the Last
Minstrel” (1805).(2) It will be argued that Austen’s protagonist, the female reader Fanny Price,
is intrigued not only by Inchbald’s comic heroine, the gender-bending Amelia Wildenhaim, but
Scott’s dark anti-heroine, Lady Branxholm,(3) a sorceress. Indeed, the lady functions as another
mirror image (made strange) and role model—inspiring Fanny to emulate her seemingly
empowering gender reversal.(4)
<2> At Mansfield Park, Fanny is prescribed by her cousin Edmund Bertram “educational”
literature exclusively by men—or male discourse—that shall apparently teach her “proper”
womanhood.(5) But the list of books includes Scott’s romance, presenting Fanny with a gothic
anti-heroine who desires to be a man in order to rule the ‘male’ body politic. Fanny, the
“creepmouse” (106), is invited to look at the gender-bound world and her subjugated position
in it through a glass darkly, or Lady Branxholm’s “altered eye” (4; Canto I, x). And like her, it
appears, Fanny comes to believe that things might be otherwise—through gender reversal. In
the present article, I will first trace Fanny’s response to the lady and the intriguing affinity
between them and their circumstances. What will follow is an exploration of Fanny’s adoption
of a male role in a private rehearsal of Lovers’ Vows in her East room in the attic—that is, gothic
space—in interaction with the lady’s gender reversal. The subversive narrative threads in the
novel and romance, then, ultimately challenge the obligatory story of heterosexual love and
marriage. Fanny and Lady Branxholm (apparently) resume their “proper” gender performance
and place in the domestic world. Yet this “happy” ending is, as will be shown, a false one.
<3> Julian Wolfreys notes that “[t]he gothic is clearly always already excessive, grotesque,
overspilling its own boundaries and limits” (8). Its anti-heroine is no less excessive and
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
uncontainable. There appears, then, to be a radical difference between the gothic Lady
Branxholm and the seemingly timid Fanny. Yet Fanny, we ought to remember, enters Mansfield
Park as another transgressive agent, or rebellious alterity. At the age of ten, she is abruptly
transplanted from her impoverished family home in Portsmouth to the genteel Mansfield Park.
Her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, already prior to her arrival, proves to be apprehensive of her as
a source of anarchic feminine nature. In fact, immediately upon her arrival, repressed
femininity gushes forth in the shape of Fanny’s flood of tears. Drawn from the sea by
Portsmouth, they are causing a commotion in the patriarch’s rational household, indeed
overspilling its boundaries. Luce Irigaray, interrogating injurious patriarchal culture, asks: “isn’t
there a fluidity, some flood, that could shake this social order?” (“Women-Mothers” 47) Fanny’s
name significantly means “free” (Harper, “Fanny”). She is hence, like Lady Branxholm, a threat
to the patriarchal order. Edmund proposes to his apprehensive father to subject Fanny to
“reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself” (16). In his roles as “guardian
and … teacher,” he will regulate her body and mind (Morrisey 202). But Edmund proves to be a
self-divided representative of patriarchy and the male discourse he recommends both
socialising and subversive (Melikoǧlu 114).
<4> It is difficult to locate in the novel Fanny’s reader-response. Not only are the references to
the works she reads, over the period of eight years, dispersed, but her response is rarely
explicitly described. Yet the fact that she twice cites from memory some (half) lines from the
“Lay” bespeaks Fanny’s familiarity with and partiality to it. Many among Austen’s contemporary
readers would have immediately recognized the references to the romance, which is based on
an old Scottish border feud. Richard D. Altick notes that it sold extremely well, that is, 15.000
copies within five years, and established Scott’s fame as a poet (qtd. in Axelrad 286). It is their
common experience of being excluded from participation in public life that triggers Fanny’s
recollection and empathy, indeed identification, with its anti-heroine.
<5> A ball shall mark the by now eighteen-year-old Fanny’s formal entry as a marriageable
young woman into society. She is expected to demonstrate her accomplishment in dance, but
her vigorous exertion of her body in quasi public space raises patriarchal concerns. Pleasure and
pain throb through her indelicately and implicitly mentioned feet that suddenly poke through
social decorum. She is “sore-footed and fatigued, restless and agitated” (202, my emphasis).
Like the overspilling gothic heroine, Fanny’s hitherto straitjacketed body spins out of control
and exceeds its ‘proper’ feminine performance. And patriarchy is displeased. During a racy
country-dance, Sir Thomas ‘advises’ Fanny to go to bed. For George Colman, this dance
epitomises the gender reversal he observes in his eighteenth-century society: “in the moral
system there seems at present to be going on a kind of Country-Dance between the Male and
Female Follies and Vices, in which they have severally crossed over, and taking each other’s
places. The men are growing delicate and refined, and the women free and easy” (qtd. in Kates
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
xxvii). Sir Thomas attempts to ward off the threat of such reversal. Fanny must “pass quietly
away,” but is “stopping at the entrance door, like the Lady of Branxholm Hall, ‘one moment and
no more,’ to view the happy scene” of dancers (201).
<6> In the “Lay,” Lady Branxholm is stopping at the door to watch her little son play with the
older knights, who already see in him a legendary future leader:
… the gray warriors prophesied,
How the brave boy, in future war,
Should tame the Unicorn’s pride
Exalt the crescents and the star” (6; Canto I, xix).
Lady Branxholm’s husband, Lord Walter, chieftain of the clan of Scott, has recently been
murdered by the clan of Carr. While their son will eventually take his place, the lady proves to
be excluded from the masculine world of chivalry. It is in recognition of their common
banishment that Fanny remembers and melts into one with the anti-heroine. Fanny is not only
the analytical, but the affective reader in whom the deep pathos (Gk “suffering” or “feeling”) in
“one moment and no more” elicits a deep empathy with the exiled lady. In patriarchal culture,
such affective reading is not only aligned with the feminine, but pathologised as a threat to
reason and restraint. In fact, “pathos” and “pathology” are, as Karin Littau notes, etymologically
connected (75). An onrush of strong emotions thus lifts Fanny out of the rational patriarchal
world and helps her sense the gothic reality of Lady Branxholm. The exiled anti-heroine rises in
revolt, urging the straitjacketed female reader in the house of patriarchal tyrannies to follow
her lead.
<7> Clearly, the pain caused by Fanny’s exclusion as a female from participation in the public
world exceeds the pain caused by her frustration in love. If, for Fanny, the ‘proper’ destiny of
women, matrimony, were the most important thing, she would identify not with the antiheroine, but her daughter, Margaret. A paragon of feminine virtue, the golden-haired and blueeyed Margaret is, like Fanny, hopelessly in love. Margaret knows that her mother “would
[rather] see her on her dying bed,” than consent to her marriage to Henry of Cranstoun (4;
Canto I, x). It is her fear of Henry as a rival to the role of chieftain, rather than his alliance with
the Carr—who have ‘conveniently’ killed her husband—that causes Lady Branxholm to forbid
the marriage. Similarly, Fanny is secretly romantically attached to Edmund, but Sir Thomas
insists that the poor girl must know her place. Despite their common frustration, Fanny does
not even once remember or allude to Margaret. Instead, she is intrigued by Lady Branxholm,
who, as Nancy Moore Goslee observes, “uses”—or rather plans to use—“magic to help her take
on the male role of leadership” (116). A “proud and individual challenge to romantic and
domestic love,” the lady’s story is, as Moore Goslee suggests, placed in an oppositional relation
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
to that of her daughter (117). And Fanny finds herself on the side of the anti-heroine who puts
in crisis the gender roles and gender hierarchies.
<8> The motherless Lady Branxholm has actually been reconciled by her father to subversive
femininity. He is not only, like Fanny’s surrogate-father, Edmund, a clergyman, but a
necromancer who has taught the lady magic, which is rooted in the pagan worship of mother
nature, but has been appropriated by men. Yet desirous of entry into the symbolic order and
public realm, the lady wishes to be a man. She covets the wizard Michael Scott’s “Mighty Book”
of magic, a certain spell in which “[c]ould make a Ladye seem a knight” (16; Canto III, ix) —that
is, a man. Although she fails to lay her hands on the book, she assumes a masculine identity, or
gives a masculine performance, albeit maintaining her sex. This is, then, the role model that
Fanny embraces and emulates.
<9> Fanny’s association of James Rushworth’s family chapel at Sotherton with the gothic
Melrose Abbey in Scott’s romance functions as a prelude to her recollection of Lady Branxholm.
Fanny’s response to the chapel is ostensibly conditioned by Scott’s description of Melrose
Abbey from which she is citing a line and a half (Littlewood 342). Her response is, as we shall
see, also reminiscent of the protagonist of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland’s
reaction to the Tilneys’ abbey (Lau 183). When touring the chapel, Fanny does not seem to be
thinking of Lady Branxholm, but the abject is, as we come to understand, lurking in the back of
her mind.
<10> The disappointed Fanny sees “‘nothing aweful [in the chapel], nothing melancholy,
nothing grand’” (62). There are “‘No banners, cousin,’” she says to Edmund, that would remind
her of the banners of Scott’s Melrose Abbey, “‘blown by the night wind of Heaven’” and
signalling that “a ‘Scottish monarch sleeps below’” (62). In Melrose Abbey lie buried the high
and mighty who once ruled over the body politic on earth and the other world, respectively: the
Scottish monarch and Michael, holding the book of magic in his sinister hand. Similarly, an
enthusiastic reader of gothic novels, Catherine anticipates an old abbey replete with a shut up
or murdered wife, but to her disappointment beholds a modern one. Fanny and Catherine are
corrected and shamed by Edmund and Henry Tilney, respectively. Sensory over-stimulation
appears to have enfeebled the female readers’ rational powers and resulted in their mistaking
an extravagant gothic fiction for reality. Like Catherine, Fanny acknowledges to have been
“‘foolish’” (62). Yet, as critics have pointed out, Catherine eventually comes to the conclusion
that she has been right all along.(6) And so does Fanny. All is real: oppressive and dysfunctional
patriarchy and the exiled anti-heroine who rises up in revolt.
<11> Both Fanny’s disappointment and Edmund’s anxiety-ridden derision originate in the same
thing: the absence-presence of Lady Branxholm. Fanny mentions the dead monarch, but not
the lady—yet the abject is, as noted above, lurking in her subconscious, ready to erupt. In fact,
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
that something “‘awful… melancholy [and] grand’” (62) that Fanny has anticipated and feared
all along alludes not only to the aura of Melrose Abbey, but the anti-heroine. In the Gothic,
exile is traditionally suggested by live-burial in or denial of entry into the house. Her seeming
absence from the chapel at Sotherton is reminiscent of the lady’s being denied entry into
Melrose Abbey, the fortress of—dead—patriarchy. However, it is her quest that dominates
Scott’s romance and opens the abbey’s gates for us to step inside. Determined as she is to
undergo gender reversal, the lady sends the knight Sir William of Deloraine to recover the book
of magic from the wizard’s tomb.
<12> Fanny, then, recognises in Lady Branxholm’s story her own exilic condition in patriarchal
culture and desire for empowerment. In fact, both inhabit alien, gothic spaces that are at once
suggestive of the forgotten margins of the patriarchal house and culture, at large, and
empowering. Fanny inhabits the attic room and East room, which is also located in the attic,
and the lady “the secret bower” (3; Canto I, i). The strange, indeed uncanny, aura of the lady’s
bower, which is sealed off by magic, resonates in Fanny’s rooms. While Inchbald’s Amelia
inhabits the broad daylight world of comedy, Fanny and Lady Branxholm are denizens of a
darker world. This is the beyond or Herland that attempts but fails to entirely ward off male
intrusion.
<13> Lady Branxholm’s “secret bower … was guarded by word and by spell,” and no one “[h]ad
dared to cross the threshold stone” (3; Canto I, i). Herland is sealed off by ‘feminine’ magic,
which is, however, as noted above, appropriated by men. It, moreover, bears the name of
powerful men and is located in regal patriarchal space, “[i]n old Lord David’s western tower” (4;
Canto I, xii). The old David is not only a forbear of Lord Walter, but the shepherd-king of the Old
Testament. The latter David was secretly anointed king—while Saul was still ruling Philistine—
and killed the giant, Goliath, with his slingshot. This allusion, in turn, alludes to the lady’s initial
status as an outsider and eventual claim to the role of leader, which is, however, nullified.
While the sorceress and her pagan magic are finally exorcised, David takes his place in a long
line of male rulers and—as the reputed author of many psalms—narrators sanctified in the Old
Testament.
<14> Her introspection in private space also brings to light the lady’s internal conflict. J.H.
Alexander observes that “[t]he unnaturalness of the Ladye’s hatred [of Cranstoun] is vividly
conveyed by her absurd address to the Mountain and River Spirits” (29). Actually, the debate
between the two allegorical figures, I would argue, is an internal one.(7) The River Spirit and
Mountain Spirit represent the lady’s feminine and masculine component, respectively; both
agree that the lady’s feud must have an end, her pride be quelled and Margaret’s tears
stopped. Yet the defiant lady replies to the spirits thus:
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
“Your mountains shall bend
And your streams ascend
Ere Margaret be our foeman’s bride!” (5; Canto I, xviii)
Mountains rise and streams fall, but the lady is fiercely resolved to go against the very ‘nature’
of things—that is, transgress the seemingly natural and fixed boundaries between men and
women. Her endeavour, then, seems both wrong and futile. The debate ultimately shows that it
is both patriarchy and her self-dividedness that eventually undo the lady.
<15> It is in both her attic and East room that Fanny reads silently literature(8) written by men
and recommended by a man. However, there is in her a similar desire for transport to Herland.
Will Morrisey draws attention to the fact that Fanny—in chapter eleven—proposes to Edmund
to do some stargazing on Cassiopeia (220) rather than the male star he is pointing at. Herland,
then, takes the shape of a female planet, far beyond and above the troubled earth. Cassiopeia
is also suggestive of Fanny’s desire to retrieve, in the true spirit of Luce Irigaray—if I may be
pardoned an anachronism—her bond with her mother, or maternal genealogy. In mythology,
Cassiopeia, as Morrisey reminds us, was “a queen who boasted of her beauty and nearly lost
her daughter,” Andromeda, to a sea monster, as a punishment (220). Fanny is estranged from
her mother, but her East room, imprinted by male discourse, as William Deresiewicz observes,
also constitutes “a substitutively maternal space” where she keeps “a collection of powerfully
evocative momentos” that help her reconstruct her “personal history” (57)—or herstory.
<16> It is noteworthy that, in the list of her possessions kept in the room, her geraniums are
mentioned before her books and writing desk, as suggestive of Fanny’s prioritisation of nature
over culture and, by extension, of femininity over masculinity. The spaces she inhabits may not
be sealed off by magic from patriarchal scrutiny, but she proves resistant to it. When Edmund
enters her East room and notices books lying on her table, they are closed. He himself opens
one in an act of violation of privacy, but elicits from Fanny no response to his question about
the progress of her reading.
<17> The East room’s association with China accentuates not only Fanny’s relative
inaccessibility, but alterity, as reminiscent of the sorceress’s. The association is established
through Fanny’s reading of the representative of George III, Lord George Macartney’s Journal of
the Embassy to China. J. M. Roberts notes that “China was remote, inaccessible to alien
influence, far from sources of disturbance in other great civilizations” (428). It is also here, in
the East room, that Sir Thomas, utterly shocked by her refusal to marry the well-situated Henry
Crawford, pathologises Fanny as “‘wilful and perverse,’” a woman thrown into “‘a wild fit of
folly”’ (226-227)—or a madwoman (Melikoǧlu 112). “[F]rom its place of banishment,” as Julia
Kristeva notes, “the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). Fanny, as suggestive of
the sorceress and—dare we say—Charlotte Brontë’s iconic madwoman, or ‘ghost,’ in the attic,
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
Bertha Mason, represents what Kristeva calls a “massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness
which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me” —or
patriarchy— “as radically separate, loathsome” (2). A fire is burning in Bertha’s attic, but
Fanny’s rooms have for many years been cold. Patriarchy fears fire, which will reanimate
women. In the absence of a fire, affective reading revives and kindles the spark of rebellion in
Fanny and renders her uncanny to a cold and rational patriarchy.
<18> While a dominantly masculine Lady Branxholm emerges from the exilic space she inhabits
in order to participate in the political world, Fanny remains in the patriarchal house, but
delivers a travesty performance in a rehearsal. In the “Lay,” we are presented an evil world of
“discord” and “death-feud” and dissolution caused by power-hungry rivalling males (4; Canto I,
viii). Neither “piety …[nor] Christian lore … patriot zeal …love of blessed charity” (4; Canto I, viii)
can, we are told, put an end to this war. In this time of crisis, the clan of Scott actually welcome
Lady Branxholm’s courageous leadership, shared with the seneschal, in the war against the Carr
and their English foes. We are told that:
The noble Dame, amid the broil,
Shared the grey Seneschal’s high toil,
And spoke of danger with a smile;
Cheer’d the young knights, and council sage
Held with the chiefs of riper age (20; Canto III, xxxi).
Lady Branxholm also raises a band to seize upon the enemy. She is referred to as “Dame,” but
her integration into the ‘male’ body politic suggests a gender reversal, accomplished without
the help of the book of magic.
<19> In fact, Lady Branxholm’s political career is presented to be in conflict with her roles as
wife and mother. Although she recognises the lady’s desire to rule, Moore Goslee believes that
her actual aim is to avenge the death of her husband and “protect her family and borderterrain” (16). Yet I argue that Lady Branxholm desires to replace rather than avenge her
husband.(9) It is his ‘convenient’ death that allows the lady to emancipate herself from her
traditional gender role in the domestic sphere and enter the public realm. In fact, she is also
ready to sacrifice her children to her political ambition. Margaret, who believes that her mother
would rather see her dead than married to Henry, alludes to the threat of infanticide. The lady
directs another such latent threat towards her son, who is the heir of Branxholm Hall. She
“blushed blood-red” when, prior to a battle, her son, who is possessed by the goblin, acts
cowardly (25; Canto IV, xiv, my emphasis). Furious that “‘[t]hat coward should e’er be son of
mine!’” (25; Canto IV, xiv), she orders one of her men to take him home; but her son falls into
the hands of the enemy. Patriarchy is a culture founded on sacrifice and war. Lady Branxholm,
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
too, sacrifices others—in fact, her family—and wars with the enemy, and yet she is presented
as a mere semblance of a male, an impostor of sorts.
<20> We must remember that the certain spell in Michael’s book of magic—which Lady
Branxholm fails to acquire—“[c]ould make a Ladye seem a knight” (16; Canto III, ix, my
emphasis), rather than actually change her anatomical sex. Towards the end of the “Lay,”
representatives of patriarchy return to reassert control. Does their return, then, imply the
lady’s failure to inhabit a masculine identity? This would, in turn, affirm the assumption of a
natural and unsurmountable difference between men and women. But neither the “Lay”
nor Mansfield Parkallows for such a conservative premise.
<21> Before her formal entry into society as a marriageable young woman, Fanny plays a
travesty role. Her performance, which is delivered in the East room rather than in the public
realm, may be considered to be less subversive than Lady Branxholm’s. Yet Fanny has been
prepared for her role through children’s play—which Plato considers to be a political threat to
the stability of the state. Before parting from Portsmouth, she was “playfellow” (11) for her
siblings, four brothers and one sister. Plato both acknowledges the socialising effect of
children’s play and fears that the child who would at a whim change the rules of the game was
likely to grow into an adult who would attempt to change the laws of the republic(10)—or, we
may add, disregard the traditional gender boundaries. We may, in fact, assume that Fanny
played boy’s games with her four brothers. The seeming model of feminine virtue is, moreover,
associated with a metonym of masculinity, a knife. When sent back to Portsmouth, she ends
her sisters Susan and Betsey’s quarrel over a knife, the legacy of their dead sister, Mary,(11) by
buying another one. The rehearsals at Mansfield Park, then, open up space for Fanny (and
other players) to experiment further with gender.
<22> The rehearsals attest to Austen’s great interest in—rather than condemnation of—the
world of theatre.(12) Many popular comedies, to which Austen was partial (Byrne 64), featured
male and female cross-dressing and travesty.(13) These gender-bending performances and the
heated “debates over what made women feminine and men masculine” they caused (Straub,
“Actors” 258) clearly spilled over into Mansfield Park and possibly the “Lay.” Scott, who also
wrote dramatic works and acquired the Adelphi Theatre (Fowler Wright 639), too, was familiar
with the contemporary stage. When settling on Lovers Vows, Tom Bertram suggests that his
sister Julia play Cottager’s wife, but speak her husband’s more serious lines, which alludes to a
sort of hermaphroditism. Lady Branxholm and the seneschal, who rule the clan together,
constitute another ‘hermaphroditic’ body. After Julia refuses the role of Cottager’s wife, Tom
presses Fanny to play the part. Fanny, too, declines, but tries to help James Rushworth, whose
gender is ambiguous, memorise his lines. In his role as the fop Count Cassel, Rushworth is to
wear a pink satin cloak over his blue dress, thus openly displaying his and his character’s
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
‘feminine’ side, while hiding their ‘masculine’ side. Her involvement in these instances of
gender confusion, then, functions as a prelude to Fanny’s attempt at a travesty role.
<23> In the private rehearsal in her East room, Fanny reads the clergyman Anhalt’s speech on
matrimony to Mary Crawford, who is cast as his love-interest, Amelia Wildenhaim. Fanny is
standing in for Edmund, thereby playing simultaneously two male roles. Fanny tells Mary, “‘I
will do my best with the greatest readiness’” (122); so she is not at all averse to playing a male
role. We may ask ourselves whether it is not her identification with the gender-bending Lady
Branxholm that motivates Fanny’s prompt compliance with Mary’s request. This is her chance
to emulate the lady. However, if Lady Branxholm appears, as noted above, to be exposed as a
mere semblance of a male, Fanny apparently fails to even merely seem a man.
<24> Dressed in her own clothes—which are an important part of the performance of gendered
identity— and “with looks and voice so truly feminine,” Fanny is “no good picture of a man”
(122). Again, Fanny tells Mary that “‘I must read the part, for I can say very little of it,’” as
apparently suggestive of her incapability to deliver a masculine performance. There arises,
then, the question to what extent Fanny and Lady Branxholm’s seemingly unconvincing
performances in a male role constitute a challenge to the idea of an authoritative patriarchy. In
order to shed some light on this question, let us return to the contemporary public theatre.
<25> Kristina Straub observes that late eighteenth-century audiences sought to persuade
themselves that actresses in breeches performed “an obvious parody which left gender
boundaries unquestioned” (“Guilty” 423). Put in breeches, the actresses, Straub remarks,
displayed their legs in order to “sell tickets” (“Guilty” 424). Similarly, Lady Branxholm, albeit not
urging her female charms, as noted above, merely seems to be a man. Her and Fanny’s travesty
performances—in women’s dress—may appear to be unconvincing and hence non-threatening.
Yet Straub continues to argue that even so actresses in breeches roles did challenge the
traditional definition of the gender roles. She remarks that “the ‘castrated’ figure of the crossdressed actress is ... capable of holding a mirror up to masculinity that reflects back an image of
castration” (“Guilty” 429). The laughter that Fanny’s poor performance provokes is, then, also
directed at what she attempts to represent, Edmund, or men in general. Lady Branxholm
appears to be another, in Straub’s words, “failed m[a]n” (429) and thus also suggestive of loss
of manhood.
<26> But are Lady Branxholm and Fanny’s performances really unsuccessful? What is the norm
according to which they are judged? An ambitious, counselling and warring leader, the lady
may, in fact, be said to show a perfectly ‘masculine’ performance. But neither does the
patriarchy in the“Lay” nor in Mansfield Park correspond to the traditional notion of manliness.
We may remember Lady Branxholm’s husband’s broken sword, as suggested not only of his
death but loss of ‘manhood’ in his realm, which allows her to adopt the role of leader. There is
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
also the feminisation of her father and Michael through magic, which is, as noted above, rooted
in the pagan worship of the mother earth, or archaic belly-magic. When Sir Deloraine and the
Monk go to Melrose Abbey, the dead Michael, the book of magic in his left hand, issues from
the tomb, as if from the womb. In Mansfield Park, Mary’s much-noted pun on “Rears,
and Vices” (44), in allusion to sodomy in the navy, not only undermines the illusion of a strong
patriarchy, but the masculinity of the entire English nation. Mary, moreover, as Byrne observes,
dominates Edmund, just as Amelia dominates the object of her love, Anhalt (160). Clearly, both
Lady Branxholm and Fanny are placed and shaped in cultures that are pervaded by profound
gender ambiguity.
<27> Austen introduces another twist. Lady Branxholm’s heterosexuality is never questioned;
she appears to have feelings for Sir Deloraine, but love seems to be irreconcilable with political
ambition. On the other hand, David Marshall, in reference to Fanny and Mary’s private
rehearsal, speaks of “homoerotic currents” (77). Mary’s following words to Fanny, “‘You must
rehearse with me so that I may fancy you [Edmund]’” (122), are indeed suggestive of a
confusion of love object choice and homo-eroticism. Even if for a reason irrelevant to the
present discussion, Jill Heydt-Stevenson associates Fanny with the eponymous protagonist of
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill (1748-1749)
(328),(14) which, as Kirsten Pullen comments, “contains perhaps the most famous literary
example of eighteenth-century lesbianism” (85). Are we presented a lesbian utopia? In an early
scene, we see Austen’s Fanny, as noted above, longing to do some stargazing on a female
planet. Even if tongue-in-cheek, we are suggested different alternatives: women’s participation
in a ‘male’ body politic, which requires that they be like a man only to be exposed as a mere
semblance of a man, and women’s reconciliation with subversive femininity and transport to a
female utopia.
<28> Both Austen and Scott are, then, acutely aware of the inadequacy of the dominant
attitude towards sex and gender, signalling the need for change. Cultural renewal might
actually lead back to the past when, as Anne Fausto-Sterling reminds us, “[e]arly medical
practitioners” and, we may add, their societies “understood sex and gender to fall a continuum
and not into ... discrete categories” (33). Again, they “were not,” as Fausto-Sterling continues to
observe, “fazed by hermaphrodites. Sexual difference, they thought, involved quantitative
variation. Women were cool, men hot, masculine women or feminine men warm”
(33). In Mansfield Park and the “Lay,” there is an attempt to return to this understanding of sex
and gender.
<29> In order to make a profound change, public discourse, regulated by and privileging men,
must be revised. It is in particular Lady Branxholm’s—vain—attempt to come into possession of
Michael’s book that attests to an awareness of the power that resides in discourse, defining,
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
among others, individuals’ gender roles. Despite the relevance of the book in their narratives,
neither Austen nor Scott dispenses altogether with the presupposition of an essential interior
core of gendered identity.(15) However, their protagonists (and other characters) suggest that
men and women’s nature’s are more complex than the rigidly defined categories of sex and
gender allow for. Lady Branxholm, as noted above, possesses both an apparently inherent
masculine and feminine component. The privileging of everything defined as masculine by
social discourse causes the lady to try to ‘shed’ her feminine side and cultivate her masculine
side. In Mansfield Park, Fanny rapturously exclaims, in the presence of Mary, “how astonishing
a variety of nature!” and goes on to say that it “does not make it less amazing, that the same
soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence”
(149). We may suspect that she is referring not only to the variety found among plants, but
human beings. This variety is presented as the very law of nature. Yet in both texts, the
subversive storyline uncovering this variety is abruptly disrupted by representatives of
patriarchy.
<30> In Mansfield Park, Edmund interrupts Fanny’s travesty performance vis-à-vis Mary. Sir
Thomas’s sudden return from Antigua terminates the rehearsals altogether and apparently
restores order at Mansfield Park. Inthe“Lay,” Margaret’s lover, Henry, the lady’s son, the ghost
of Michael and the holy fathers (re)appear to reassert control. The agents of the subversive
storylines are scooped up into the obligatory story of marriage, and the crises they have caused
seem to be resolved. Morrisey argues that “[the lady] is bringing peace and arranging a
marriage that will ensure the continuance of peace” (207). While she is said to have renounced
her magic and attended her daughter’s wedding, Fanny marries Edmund. Both women are
seemingly reconciled to their traditional roles in patriarchal culture. Yet nothing is as it seems.
<31> Jane Milligate points to the minstrel’s compression of the wedding into a few lines and
awkward conclusion of the “Lay” with the fathers’ hymn for the dead rather than “a marriage
anthem” (21). What we are presented with is the revenant ghost of Scott and the holy fathers’
exorcism of the overreaching lady from both the text and culture. It is “[f]alse slanders,” the
minstrel insists, that:
… the Ladye high
Chapel or altar came not nigh;
Nor durst the rites of spousal grace,
So much she fear’d each holy place (40; Canto VI, v).
The anti-heroine’s alleged absence is suggestive of both exorcism and resistance to being
absorbed into a false happy end. However, there is no alternative place that can accommodate
her alterity other than the twilight zone.(16)
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
<32> Neither can nor will Fanny be assimilated into the civic order. She, too, ends up utterly
uprooted. “[T]he conclusion of Mansfield Park is,” as Jo Alyson Parker notes, “suggestive of
alienation and exclusion rather than celebration and reconciliation” (250). While quite a few
characters are exiled from Mansfield Park because of their acting in the home theatricals, Fanny
is packed off to her family home at Portsmouth for her refusal to marry Henry. Upon her arrival,
she falls into her mother’s arms, “this first body, this first home, this first love” (Irigaray,
“Bodily” 39), from whom her entrance into the symbolic order has alienated her. Yet the
mother she has expected all along to be reunited with turns out to be overworked and
negligent. Thus disillusioned, it is now Mansfield Park that she considers to be “the home”
(309). Yet she is nowhere at home.
<33> At Portsmouth, her homesickness reminds Fanny of the schoolboy in William
Cowper’sTirocinium: or, A Review of Schools (1785)who finally returns home—but the child
proves to be irrevocably estranged from his parents. Again, before her return to Mansfield Park,
Fanny reads Samuel Johnson’s romance The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759).
Rasselas, accompanied by others, leaves the Happy Valley in search of perfect happiness, but
eventually gives up all idealism and decides to return home. This would attest to Fanny’s
awareness that neither her family home nor Mansfield Park nor the outside world is a happy
abode. While Lady Branxholm simply disappears, we see Fanny wander from one false home to
another: she is first called back from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park and after her marriage to
Edmund transplanted to the parsonage. Like Margaret and Inchbald’s Amelia, Fanny must
acquiesce in the traditional destiny of women, but her identification with Lady Branxholm is
suggestive of frustrated ambition and alienation.
<34> Both the“Lay” and Mansfield Park defy resolution and suggest strange and inconclusive
reiterations of Lady Branxholm and Fanny’s rebellion. The Duchess of Buccleuch, is, like the
lady, another proud—and possibly politically ambitious—widow. It may hence be said that the
Duchess is not only the recipient of the minstrel’s performance of the “Lay,” but listening to her
own story- the story of a woman who wishes to be a man in order to participate in the ‘male’
body politic. Towards the very end of Mansfield Park, Susan emerges as another potential
female protagonist who is exposed—by Fanny—to literature and seeks to exceed her ‘proper’
role. Susan is established at Mansfield Park to attend to the wants and needs of Lady Bertram,
and Betsey is next in line. Such service is traditionally aligned with women, but both sisters are,
as noted above, in possession of a ‘phallic’ knife. The conclusion of Mansfield Park is, then,
suggestive of doubling or a variation on the theme: an almost new generation of young women
will rise in revolt against their exilic condition in patriarchal culture and demand empowerment.
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
Endnotes
(1)For the relevance of Lovers’ Vows as an intertext to Mansfield Park, see William Reitzel,
“Mansfield Park and Lovers’ Vows,” Review of English Studies 9 (1933): 451-456. See also Paula
Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002),
149-176 and 177-209. In Ian Littlewood, “Notes,” Mansfield Park, Jane Austen, 2nd ed. (Ware,
Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), 341-344, Littlewood also refers to other intertexts,
such as Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Milton’s Paradise Lost, Cowper’s The
Task andTirocinium, Johnson’s The Idler and Rasselas, Macartney’s Plates to his Embassy in
China andJournal of the Embassy and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.(^)
(2)It is probably Will Morrisey who gives the intertextual link between Mansfield Park and the
“Lay” the greatest attention, albeit not in terms of gender confusion. See Morrisey, Culture in
the Commercial Republic (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1996), Chapter 10,
“The Politics of Self-Knowledge: Mansfield Park and the Refounding of the English Aristocracy,”
197-251. I elsewhere suggested that Fanny is partial to “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and
intrigued, in particular, by the masculine Lady Branxholm, but did not explore their affinity or
Fanny’s re-enactment of her gender reversal. See Esra Melikoǧlu, “Bibliomania and Home
Theatricals in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” Jane Austen and Her Work: Proceedings of the
18th METU British Novelists Conference, eds. Margaret J-M Sönmez et al. (Ankara: Kardelen
Ofset, 2011), 116-117.(^)
(3)In Mansfield Park, the lady’s surname is spelt “Branxholm.” In order to avoid confusion, I will
adopt this spelling rather than the spelling in the edition of the “Lay” I use, “Branksome,”
except in quotations from that edition.(^)
(4)In Joel C. Weinsheimer, “Mansfield Park: Three Problems,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29. 2
(1974): 193, Weinsheimer argues that Mansfield Park is possibly “a rustic cousin of Gothic
Romance” and Fanny a helpless, pathetic gothic heroine. I, on the other hand, argue that Fanny
demonstrates subversive agency as reminiscent of Lady Branxholm.(^)
(5)It is thanks to Edmund’s brother Tom, who suggests that they perform Lovers’ Vows, that
Fanny reads and becomes involved in the rehearsals of a (dramatic) work by a female writer.
She picks up a copy of the play presumably left by Tom on a table and begins to read.(^)
(6)In Emily Auerbach, Searching For Jane Austen (Madison, Wisconsin and London: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91, Auerbach remarks that the presumed Bluebeard “General Tilney
summarily ejects Catherine Morland from his home because he has discovered that she is not
rich.” Auerbach goes on to say that “[t]hough Austen pillories gothic melodrama in Northanger
Abbey, she simultaneously shows that the world really does offer … hidden evils.” Catherine is,
then, in principle, proven right.(^)
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
(7)In Heldris De Cornualle, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. Sarah RocheMahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007), 117-125, Silence, a girl who is
brought up as a boy and becomes a knight, too, experiences an internal conflict represented in
the shape of a debate between allegorical figures. While Nurture, who has turned her “into a
defective male,” and Reason approve of her travesty, Nature taunts her (123).(^)
(8)Fanny also reads to her aunt Lady Bertram in the drawing-room. Yet it is her unsupervised
silent and introspective reading in private space that is more dangerous.(^)
(9)In Walter Scott, “Introduction and Notes to The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” The Poetical Works
of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson, 12th ed. (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1944), 52, Scott acknowledges to have been inspired by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s use of an irregular meter in Christabel, which (Dr. John) Stoddart had recited to him.
Lady Branxholm proves to be reminiscent of Coleridge’s shape-shifting Geraldine, another witch
who besieges rather than defends a weakened chivalric order.(^)
(10)For Plato’s view on the socialising nature of children’s play, see Plato, The Laws, trans.
Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 1.643; for his view of children’s play as a
threat to the state, see 1.798.(^)
(11)Fanny’s dead sister, Mary, is the missing link between her and the emancipated Mary
Crawford, whose wit directed at patriarchy cuts like a knife. Seemingly radically different from
each other and rivals for Edmund’s love, Fanny and Mary Crawford are also sisters or
doubles.(^)
(12)For Austen’s interest in all things theatrical, see See, for example, Paula Byrne, Jane Austen
and the Theatre (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002).(^)
(13)See Kristina Straub, “The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing,” Feminist
Theory and the Body, eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999),423-431. See also Kristina Straub, “Actors and Homophobia,” Cultural Readings of
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, eds. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah
Payne Fisk (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 258-280. Paula Byrne observes
that Austen, an eager theatre-goer, most likely saw the gender-bending Lovers’ Vows in Bath,
where it was staged about seventeen times during the period of her stay there, that is, from
1801-1806. According to Byrne’s account of Austen’s visits to the theatre, she saw at least one
play that, unlike Inchbald’s, actually featured cross-dressing. In Of Age Tomorrow, the leading
male actor, John Bannister, as Byrne notes, performed in a cross-dressed role. See Byrne, Jane
Austen and the Theatre, 39 and 42-43.(^)
(14)Heydth-Stevenson argues that both Fannies are sexual objects exchanged among men.(^)
©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue
(15)Nor must we assume that, given the relevance of the home theatricals, Austen completely
subscribes to Judith Butler’s notion of gendered identity as a performative act that is designed
in accordance with discourse and can be learned, abandoned and changed.(^)
(16)In the above-mentioned romance Silence, the eponymous protagonist—a girl who is raised
as a boy and becomes a knight—later adopts the disguise of a male minstrel. In the
introduction, Sarah Roche-Mahdi notes the popularity of “the theme of girl as minstrel”(xvii). Is
it possible that the minstrel in Scott’s romance is Lady Branxholm in disguise?(^)
Works Cited
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Scott, Walter. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. J.
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©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue